


You Feel the Echo

by mathelode (engmaresh)



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/F, Intimacy, Loyalty, Military Ranks, Rare Pairings, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2020-11-23 03:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20885030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engmaresh/pseuds/mathelode
Summary: From the moment they first meet, Zhu Li's a mystery to Kuvira. But there's something that keeps drawing them together. As Kuvira goes from guard to leader to Great Uniter, Zhu Li follows.





	You Feel the Echo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).

> Title from Vienna Teng's _Never Look Away_.

Varrick and Zhu Li made quite an entrance into Zaofu. Kuvira had been warned to expect guests, but she hadn’t been told to anticipate their entry via air, nor that they’d be arriving just in time to almost smack into one of the descending petals of the Beifong estate. 

The smoking plane had managed to veer aside at the last second, spiralling downward into a carefully controlled crash that ended up in one of Suyin’s ornamental fountains. Kuvira would never find out if it was sheer luck or intention, but either way, it served the occupants of the plane well, when the fire that sprung up in the tail was promptly put out by Nila bending the entire contents of the fountain onto it.

As Kuvira ran up to the wreckage, one of the doors opened. It dangled briefly on a hinge as water gushed over the threshold, then broke and fell to the ground with a loud crash. With a wave of her hand, she bent the metal into some rough stairs—the crash had left the entryway open several feet above the ground, and she was sure the passengers weren’t going to be fit enough to climb down to safety. 

The first to appear at the door was a man. Both pencil-thin moustache and mop of hair were plastered against his face, and a watery trickle of blood dripped off his chin as he tried to haul himself out of his plane. The drop to the ground didn’t seem to register to him, but lucky for him that it did to Nila, who swept a slide of ice up to the entrance, saving him a rough trip down the crude metal steps.

He lay on the floor, groaning and sodden. Kuvira gestured to the waterbending guard to take care of him, as she bounded up the stairs into the creaking, no longer burning, wreck of a plane. 

The first thing she noticed was the pile of luggage that had come unsecured, piled up near the tail end of the plane. Then, to her horror, she saw the hand that dangled limply from behind the pile.

“Hello!” she called, hoping that this second passenger was conscious—was alive—to hear her. “Please stay still, I’m coming over.”

Extending her reach beyond cabin, she bent the wings of the plane down, forming a tripod of sorts and melding the metal of the wings with the metal of the ground for additional stability. Hollow footsteps rang out behind her as someone else climbed the steps; she turned and seeing Hong Li, gestured at him to stay back.

“Take the luggage,” she ordered him, and together, they carefully bent and lifted the many suitcases and trunks from the plane, grateful that it was now in fashion to adorn luggage in all manner of metal buckles and hinges and snaps.

Finally the second passenger emerged from under the pile. The woman was still strapped to her seat, and the small nook that she’d been tucked into seemed to have protected her from being crushed by the cargo—mostly. A broken pair of glasses dangled from one ear, and she held one arm to her chest in a manner that suggested it was broken. Her eyes were open, but they seemed to have trouble focusing on Kuvira—that could either be poor eyesight or a concussion.

“I’m coming over,” Kuvira said again. Two outward, sweeping gestures of her arms unspooled the cables on either side of her belt, securing her to the sides of the plane and leaving her hands free. Carefully she shuffled forward, feeling the metal bend and creak beneath her feet. She was faintly aware of voices outside the hull, and the bending of her fellow guards as they further worked to stabilise the plane, but most of her focus was on the woman, and how to get her to safety.

The woman finally seemed to notice her, and pulled herself upright, her good hand coming up to her face to adjust her glasses. They sat crooked on her face, a crack spidering through one of the lenses.

“Is Varrick all right?” she asked, her low voice steady despite the pain she had to be in.

“He’s safe,” Kuvira told her, as she pried open the buckles of her safety belt as quickly but carefully as she could. “Can you walk?”

“I think so,” said the woman, as she lurched to her feet. “I’m Zhu Li, by the way.”

“Kuvira,” Kuvira replied, despite the fact that the crumbling wreckage of a crashed plane was hardly the place for introductions.

She slung Zhu Li’s good arm over her shoulder. After readjusting the cables tethering her one-by-one so that she could turn them both around without tangling them in it, she started for the door, arm wrapped around Zhu Li’s waist. Hong Li had been replaced at the door by Hanyu, and he sent out his own cables to wrap around Kuvira’s belt so he could reel them both in. They’d almost made it to the door, when Zhu Li’s arm slackened, and Kuvira found herself staggering under the woman’s sudden dead weight. “Hurry!” Hanyu yelled, and the cables around her waist tightened. Kuvira swept the woman into her arms—she was surprisingly heavy despite her slender frame—and the next few moments where ones of minor chaos as she ran for the door, Hanyu grabbing her and hauling her down the stairs. Still holding the unconscious woman tightly to her chest, Kuvira whirled around just in time to watch the plane split in two with a terrible groan.

Next to them, completely oblivious to his saved cargo, Varrick grabbed his hair and fell to his knees. “My baggages!”

* * *

“I’m sorry,” said Kuvira, holding her hands up to show the startled woman she came in peace. “The light was on. I had to investigate.”

“It’s okay,” Zhu Li murmured. “You’re just doing your job.”

Despite the lateness of the hour, she was still dressed in her day clothes, though she’d removed the ornamental necklace. Kuvira was dressed in her uniform, but she was on guard duty tonight, she was _ supposed _ to be awake. Zhu Li, technically, was not.

“Why are you still working so late?” she asked, taking in the welding helmet Zhu Li was wearing and the spread of circuit boards before her. “Is _ he _ making you do this?”

Zhu Li shook her head. “I just can’t sleep. Please, don’t let me interrupt your work, Captain.”

“It’s fine,” said Kuvira, slipping off her helmet. She wasn’t slacking off. But she wasn’t expected back at her post yet, and she’d gotten away with some loitering in the past, usually when chasing one of the Baatars out of their workshop after midnight. She was familiar with the scientist-engineer-type. It hadn’t occurred to her that Zhu Li might have been one of them too.

She peered down at the intricate circuit boards, and Zhu Li, realising that censure was not forthcoming, returned to her work. “Why are you still his assistant when you’re clearly doing all the work for him?”

“He has the ideas. I help him out with them.”

Kuvira frowned. “But aren’t you his PA too?”

Zhu Li shrugged with the arm that wasn’t holding the welding tool. “I assist Varrick in a lot of different ways.”

“You scrub his feet for him.”

“It’s one of the ways I assist him, yes.” Her tone that told Kuvira she was pushing it. She backed off.

“I’ll be making another round at four,” she told Zhu Li as she put her helmet back on. “Please don’t be here when I pass by.”

Zhu Li was still there at four.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Kuvira asked. Her shift would end at six, and she was already looking forward to bed.

“I took a nap,” Zhu Li explained, and indeed, a cot had appeared in the corner of the workshop, a blanket folded neatly across the foot of it. Where it had come from, Kuvira couldn’t tell. Had Zhu Li _ built _ it in the intervening hours?

She’d apparently completed whatever it was she had been doing with the circuit boards, and the all the welding equipment had been put neatly away. In their place on the workbench was a miniature train set. Kuvira recognized it—it had previously resided in Baatar’s section of his father’s workshop, though he usually kept it covered with a dust sheet. Were he and Varrick working together now? Kuvira doubted it. Baatar never had anything nice to say about Varrick.

“We asked to borrow it,” said Zhu Li, correctly reading the expression that must have shown on Kuvira’s face. “Varrick had some ideas about the railway lines.”

“And you’re building them for him.”

“I had some ideas of my own.”

Kuvira looked from the miniature train, running its silent circuits around a miniature facsimile of Zaofu, to the notebook open in Zhu Li’s lap, pages covered in what looked like shorthand. It struck her somewhat belatedly that she’d probably been intruding on important work.

“Sorry,” she said, bowing at the waist as she slowly started backing towards the door. “Just don’t stay up too late.”

“Pick me up after your shift, Captain,” said Zhu Li, head bent over her work once again.

Kuvira hesitated, then nodded in affirmative before she left. It was only when she'd returned back to her post when she realised that Zhu Li might not have seen her agreement.

But Zhu Li was still there when Kuvira came by the workshop shortly after six, ‘napping’ in the makeshift cot, blanket pulled up to her shoulders. She slept with her glasses in her hand, curled next to her face. Kuvira bit her lip, looking down at the other woman. Soon the domes would come down, and if they were lucky, they could catch the tail end of the sunrise before heading to sleep. A proper bed would probably do Zhu Li some good, but it felt cruel to disturb her rest. Then again, there was no guarantee that Zhu Li would actually stay asleep; for all Kuvira knew, she'd be back up again within the hour, once again bent over her work. So she nudged the other woman awake, first offering her a hand to help her stand, then her arm as she escorted Zhu Li back to the wing she shared with Varrick.

They stopped at a balcony to catch the sunrise over the mountains. It was, as always, beautiful, but Kuvira found to her surprise that despite her late hours, this was the first time Zhu Li had seen it.

“The view’s best from the central tower of course. I could bring you there one day. Maybe for a sunset.”

“I don’t think I’d be allowed up there, Captain.”

“Please,” said Kuvira, “call me Kuvira.” _ Captain _ just reminded her too much of the way Zhu Li called Varrick _ sir_.

“Kuvira,” said Zhu Li. Her hand on Kuvira’s arm tightened, or maybe she was just imagining it. “If it’s alright with you, I’d rather stick to this. I prefer the quiet mornings anyway.”

* * *

“You’re coming with us?”

Kuvira had come down to Varrick’s quarters to check on him. Baatar’s fault, really. He’d kept complaining about how the inventor wasn’t to be trusted, and she’d let it get to her. And he’d had a point. Varrick was Water Tribe, and a businessman with a past history of war profiteering. He would’ve sold his own people down the river for a quick yuan, and now she was relying on him to both fund and supply her relief efforts for a nation that wasn’t his own.

At Kuvira’s question, Zhu Li looked up from her suitcase. It was her own, judging from the brassiere she’d just folded into it, unless there was a lot more to Varrick than Kuvira even dared suspect.

“Why should I not?”

Kuvira folded her arms. “Why are you so loyal to him? You’re not his servant. You’re not his wife. Does he have something on you?”

Zhu Li laughed. Actually laughed. It was a small, short one, with barely any humour in it, but it was more expression than Kuvira had gotten out of her in _ months_. “I’m going because I want to, Kuvira. Why else?”

“But…” Kuvira tried not to let her confusion show. She couldn’t risk displaying any kind of weakness, not this late into her plans. Suyin was already suspicious, and just because she didn’t have Aiwei any more, it didn’t mean she lacked other ways of watching her people. “It won’t be safe. I don’t care how much Varrick’s paying you, you might be following us all into an active warzone.”

“An active warzone that happens to be my hometown,” said Zhu Li. Her tone was short, like she’d already had an argument about the same topic. Maybe Varrick, despite his pathetic dependency on her, had tried to make Zhu Li stay behind too.

“Sorry, I didn’t know.” Kuvira stepped further into the room, unsure now if she should offer to help pack. To stay on the safe side, she clasped her hands behind her back.

“I was very young when we left,” said Zhu Li. She went over to a chest of drawers and started putting its contents into the suitcase. Some of it was clothes. The rest of it was...stuff. Probably Varrick’s. “I don’t remember much of it. My mother and I lived in the lower ring. She had an uncle in Republic City, and when he offered her a job at one of his factories she took me along.”

Kuvira nodded, silent. Along with her laughter, this was the first mention of her past beyond Varrick that Zhu Li had ever made. A day of firsts, and Kuvira wasn’t sure if she should reciprocate.

“I came to Zaofu when I was eight,” she said, before the words could stick in her throat. “I...didn’t have anyone.”

Zaofu had been kind to her, and it had the capability and resources to extend that kindness to so many more. But Suyin had decided to keep it hidden, doling it out only to those she deemed worthy of it.

Kuvira knew second chances as well as anyone in Zaofu. It wasn’t something that should remain only within the petal domes of one city.

Zhu Li said something, and Kuvira only caught the end of it: “...right thing.”

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head free of the memories. “I didn’t catch that.”

“I said I think you’re doing the right thing,” said Zhu Li.

Kuvira looked down at her boots. A lot of people had said that to her over the past few days, but it didn’t make the decision feel any easier.

She started when Zhu Li took her hand and gave it a squeeze. It was a brief, perfunctory touch, and Zhu Li went about it the way she did everything else, polite, impersonal. But Kuvira knew it meant something.

“Be at the hangers tomorrow by sunrise at six. Make sure Varrick’s there too.”

“Of course, Kuvira,” and Zhu Li said her name like she’d once said _ Captain_, yet this time Kuvira didn’t think she hated it.

* * *

Kuvira wasn’t sure at what point Zhu Li had become her assistant as well as Varrick’s. She certainly hadn’t asked that of the other woman. But here she was, back in her cabin, and Zhu Li was carefully unbuttoning the front panel of her coat. 

“I can do this myself,” Kuvira said, trying to wave Zhu Li away with her good hand, but the Zhu Li fixed her with _ a look _ and Kuvira let it fall.

“I’m fine,” she added, somewhat lamely, to the room at large.

“You should be resting your arm,” said Zhu Li, in a reproachful tone she usually reserved for Varrick. Kuvira fought back the instinctive bristle at being told what to do, and tried to hold as still as she could as Zhu Li eased the sleeve of her coat down over her broken arm. “How did you even put it on?” she muttered as she folded it and draped it over the back of a chair.

“I can still move my elbow,” Kuvira told her. “It was easier to put on than the undershirt.”

She would have taken that off herself too, but Zhu Li was already there, already rolling up the hem, her knuckles of her cool, efficient fingers brushing the hot skin of Kuvira’s waist. She repressed a shudder, and let Zhu Li pull the shirt first over one arm, then her head, before she finally slid it down her injured arm, careful not to let it catch in the splint. This too, then was folded and set aside, even though it was headed for the wash.

“I can take off my pants—” but Zhu Li was already there too, unbuckling the belt, going quietly to her knees to pull off Kuvira’s boots then help her step out of one leg, then the other. 

Kuvira stood there in her underwear, shivering slightly and not from the cold, as Zhu Li went to put away those things too.

“Are you also going to help me shower?” asked Kuvira, when Zhu Li returned to her side. Her mouth was dry, her heart was pounding and she was afraid to look down and see that traitorous red flush she felt all over her body.

“Would you like me to?”

Zhu Li had deep brown eyes and very long, delicate lashes, Kuvira noticed later when she took off her glasses in the shower after the lenses fogged up. Without them, her eyes looked bigger, even when she had to squint occasionally to see properly. Though standing as close as they were, warm water washing down between them, it wasn't something she had to do all that much. 

Efficient as always, Zhu Li had taken off all her clothes too. It was the first time Kuvira had seen her naked, and while her strength was nothing new, the wiry muscle in Zhu Li’s arms still amazed her. 

“I should give you a rank, make you one of my troops.” She could give her a special position, maybe in engineering, like the one Baatar held.

“I’m fine where I am, Kuvira,” said Zhu Li. Down on one knee, she ran a soapy scrub cloth down Kuvira’s legs. Her touch was, as always, completely professional.

Kuvira had never been more turned on in her life.

But water rations were water rations, even for commanding officers, and Kuvira soon found herself helped out of the shower and bundled into a robe. Back in the cabin, Zhu Li sat her down on her bed and began re-wrapping and re-splinting her arm. "You know, I'm not completely helpless," said Kuvira, though she made no further move to assist. She suspected Zhu Li would wave off any attempts anyway.

"No, you're never helpless," said Zhu Li, and there it was, that small elusive smile playing about her lips. "But I want to do this. Let me do this for you."

"Okay." The word was a whisper stuck in her throat. When Zhu Li tucked the end of the bandage away neatly before leaning in closer to kiss her, Kuvira curled her good hand around her neck, pulling her closer.

"Let me take care of you," said Zhu Li. Her slender hands were slipping down the collar of Kuvira’s robe, down to the loose tie at her waist. This time her touch was anything but professional. 

Kuvira lay back, and spirits help her, did.

* * *

“Baatar and Varrick are fighting again,” Zhu Li announced as she came in with the day’s reports, newspapers and tea.

Kuvira knew. She’d heard them shouting at each other during her morning rounds. “They’ll work it out,” she said, picking up the heftiest looking report, hoping to get that out of the way first. “They always do.”

Zhu Li came round the desk and Kuvira tipped her head back, even though Zhu Li didn’t have to lean down far to meet her lips. She tasted like mint and smelled faintly of jasmine, two things Kuvira had come to associate with her early mornings.

“So,” she said, sitting down across from Kuvira. “I’ve been looking over the finances. Your intel was correct, funds for the troops are vanishing under Guan’s oversight and we don’t know why.”

Kuvira absently licked her bottom lip. “We should pay him a visit. How soon can we reroute after our stop in Gaoling?”

“I’ve already asked the train operator how soon we can get there,” said Zhu Li, teacup raised. “He told me he could get the routes to me by noon today.”

Nodding, Kuvira turned to her report. The relief efforts after the monsoon floods in the southeastern states were going well by all accounts. The governors and officers Zhu Li had picked and left in charge seemed to be doing a good job, and she made a note for a commendation of sorts to be awarded for their services at the closest opportunity.

“Do you think we’ll be facing trouble with Guan?” asked Zhu Li, as she shook open the first of the newspapers. The headlines screamed something about that idiot Wu—Zhu Li would give her the salient details later.

“I hope not, but we should be prepared for the eventuality,” Kuvira said, and took a sip of her tea. They did this every morning, the tea, the reports and papers, the quiet hour together before Zhu Li left to assist Varrick, and Kuvira attended to her own duties.

And when the hour was up, Zhu Li rounded the desk once again, and pressed a kiss to Kuvira’s brow. “I’ll see you later, ma’am,” she murmured, before she walked out the door. As it did every quiet morning now between just the two of them, it sounded right.


End file.
